Google Enterprise boss predicts Compute Engine boom

Calls company's own infrastructure main ingredient of engine's 'secret sauce'

Google Enterprise head Thomas Davies has told TRPro that the company's infrastructure-as-a-service Compute Engine platform has the potential to advance more quickly in the market than any of its cloud, mobile, social or big data products in the next few years.

He said: "Cloud is going great guns, we're proud of Android and we wrote the white paper on Hadoop, so if I were to put my money on something that could have rapid advancement, it would be on the Compute Engine.

"I think for us, providing that infrastructure whereby an SMB can build an application that can potentially scale to billions of users is breathtaking.

He continued: "You've got to get it right though, and when we talk about having depth and scale, we've got the second largest network in the world. It's not just about the internet; it's our network, and this is our secret sauce that we're now licensing to others."

Going Gangbusters

A potential challenger to the dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google's Compute engine runs self-managed virtual machines and integrates with its cloud own services such as Google Cloud Storage, Google App Engine and its big data service, BigQuery. It was first announced in June 2012 at Google's annual I/O developer's conference.

Davies continued: "We took an awfully long time to bring it externally to license it because we wanted to get it right. But whether it's six, 12 or 18 months, our CFO says it's going to go 'Gangbusters'. We're putting a lot of effort into it at the moment."